Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

Here is one approach. Not perfect, and there are obviously going to be cases where it doesn’t apply. All models are wrong, some are useful.

A good metric for delegation in your case is “How much work am I doing that could plausibly be done by someone else?” Let’s call that value X, and the ideal value is zero.

Ex: you are the only one who can make strategic decisions for your company. You are not the only one who can send a promotional email.

Your process as a manager should be to systematically lower X over time. Reasons X is nonzero include but are not limited to:

- New staff need training to learn how the org etc works. This should be temporary but unavoidable, and explains why you feel like they are making more work for you.

- Staff need to upskill to take more off your plate. This means either you pay for training or train them yourself. Short term loss for long term gain.

- You have not hired the right kind of staff for the workload you face. Maybe you hired an engineer, but on balance you should have hired an accountant since that actually takes up more of your time.

- There is more work than can be handled by staff. This is an urgent problem that you need to resolve. If you burnout staff you end-up in a death spiral of turnover. The solution might be to replace inefficient processes/systems/practices, reduce work through trimming features/customers/whatever, or hire to handle growth.

The book that has made the most difference to me as a manager is Crucial Accountability and it's very relevant to what you're asking about.

I'd really encourage you to do an intro to line management type course as well. I've never known anyone come out of one saying that was amazing but people always find them useful.

A surprisingly large number of managers think that ICs work for them. This is the single biggest reason why managers are hated so much.

Reading books only gets you so far

You really need to understand the concept of leading from behind and empower the people working for you, so that they'll be motivated to do a good job and have enough "jurisdiction" to think with their brain and optimise the work. You don't want to work with automata you need to constantly micromanage.

Give them bigger chunks of work - the things you need to solve - they need to be in charge of that, as a team.

Ultimately you could give a very generic objective and let them come up with a solution. That sounds like a dream job to me.

Of course in order for this to work, you need to trust your collaborators (or fire them and replace them with people you can trust).

Remember Pinker's Autonomy (give autonomy), Mastery (let them get better at their craft) and Purpose (make them understand the mission).

Good luck, it's a bumpy road.